“How the hell should I know?” Mireille said to herself. “How could anyone, when we don’t even know what these bundles of qualities we carry and call the self is right now at this moment?” She had read somewhere “to be living is to be thinking.” This statement was made with the intention of being inclusive to all organisms on earth, and she found it beautiful in this respect. But as for herself, she often wished a way for this sentence to somehow exist as a curtailed “…to be…” and nothing more.

This wish was not a matter of numb pursuits towards some honeyed sopor; this had nothing to do with oblivious bliss or even lines. Those consoled by the style of nihilism might admire that anesthetized end as noble and offer a rhetorical, “What good was a ruin if not of your own design?” Yet Mireille did not desire to attain a life as an amputee grateful to be let loose from the distraction of limbs and their demands. She could not venerate her stumps as indicative of enlightenment. It was more to do with simply wanting to no longer consider the left foot, ponder the right—Mireille just wanted to walk.

“Whether in circles or forwards for now who really cares?”

Despite the presence of several “Top Ten Reasons To Click Here” style articles, there was nothing there on the screen that she felt was of immediate interest. After a distracted scroll down her digital profile’s wall, she logged off. Her phone was returned to its place. If you, Dear Reader, have found yourself experiencing any form of exasperation at all at this point, please explore your being for the animal’s wondrous faculty for empathy and consider just how Mireille might feel. She did not want to think about any of this.

“…to be…”

Nothing more.

Yes. All this thought, this brief foray into the clutter of ontology that she now found herself engaged in, even all this was something she considered: “fine, but just too much.” Particularly as she could foresee it as always and only an orchestra inevitably conducted through the ligaments and sieves of semantics. She did not want to live “the-movie-in-the-brain.” Mireille had grown weary of feeling that—being by biological design and perhaps some other as of yet unquantifiable element, necessarily mitigated through time-bending protein memory and sensory portals—our experience of existence had unavoidably resulted in a tape delay.

Mireille had grown weary of feeling that our experience of existence had unavoidably resulted in a tape delay.